Internet Explorer 9 has been in the wild for well over a year now, so I thought it time for some reevaluation. While other browsers have made great headway in improving support for emerging and solidifying Web standards such as HTML5 and CSS3 with numerous updates, IE9's has stood still since its release. And of course, the IE team at Microsoft is focused squarely on Windows 8's browser, IE10, which should address these concerns. But in the meantime, users are still expected to make due with IE9, so a re-examination of my review is warranted.

//Compare Similar Products

IE9 is still a vast improvement over its predecessor, IE8. Its interface is IE9 is the result of an enormous effort by Microsoft's browser development team (detailed on the IEBlog), and benefited from more beta tester feedback than any previous product from the company. It's a huge advance from the Internet Explorers of the past in terms of speed, trimmed down interface, and HTML5 support. The browser is available for download at beautyoftheweb.com, but only for users of Windows 7 and Vista. For users of those OSes, it's a highly recommended upgrade.

For those concerned about privacy, Microsoft has built in the unique new Tracking Protection, which gives users more control than Chrome and Firefox's solutions to this privacy issue. In some performance measures, particularly graphics manipulation tasks, IE9 has at this point been equaled or surpassed, even on its own hardware acceleration benchmarks. On two out of three JavaScript benchmarks, it's bested by both Chrome and Firefox. But IE9's improved tabs, search, and unique pinned site capability that places site icons in the Taskbar, all make it a worthy successor to IE8.

Setup Microsoft has finally joined other browser makers in automatically updating IE to the latest version the OS can handle. This way, developers will be able to use newer coding techniques, and users will get faster performance. Installing IE9 is now a matter of running Windows Updates; it replaces your previous version of IE. The browser, however, only runs on the most recent flavors of Microsoft's operating system—Windows 7 and Vista—and there are separate installers for 32-bit and 64-bit editions. After downloading the correct installer, running it takes longer than installing Chrome, Firefox, or Opera (Free, 4 stars), and, also unlike those, it requires a reboot and OS updates.

The Look of IE9 IE's trimmed-down window header even has the back arrow button clipped off to give the most possible space to the Web page. The tabs are squared off, and moving the browser around the screen seemed snappier. The first time you run the new browser, you no longer have to go through a wizard for choosing search suggestions and other options, as you did for IE8—another welcome simplification. The first page you see is the "welcome to a more beautiful Web," which explains and demonstrates some of IE9's new capabilities.

Most pages displayed correctly, but occasionally I saw jumbled text, though this usually corrected itself when I scrolled down and back up on the page. And on one test machine, the browser occasionally just stopped responding, even preventing me from switching tabs. I still occasionally encounter a "Not Responding" error, with the browser window going dim and the blue doughnut spinning.

Interface As mentioned, the interface is nearly identical to that of the IE9 beta. Its minimalist window leaves more room to the webpage contents than any other new browser, keeping controls to a single row and combining the address and search boxes into one. It's not as drastic, however, as Google's reduction of the interface to a single gear icon, and you can still enable IE's menus and toolbars, by right-clicking on the top window border.

Tabs. Microsoft has improved tabs work in IE9, bringing them up to date with the competition's. IE9 lets you drag tabs out of and back into your browser window to create new windows, as other browsers have done for a couple years. It even does a couple cool tricks with dragging tabs to a new window: If you do this while playing a video, the video continues to play as you drag it. Also, when you drag to the left or right edge of the screen in Windows 7, the new browser window created fills exactly half of the screen. This is as it should be—adhering to Aero Snap in Windows 7—but other browsers don't do this.

You can now place IE9's tabs on their own row if you find you're opening too many to fit. The tab with the focus is now brighter, making it stand out. I quite appreciate that I can now close a tab without switching to it, as I can in every other modern browser. But this only works if the window was sized large enough—nearly full screen on a laptop. Since IE crams everything on one row—the address/search box, tabs, and controls—tabs can get mighty narrow. But there's some help for that: arrows appear on either side of the tab bar if you open too many tabs to display in the allotted space.

The new tab page helpfully shows your most frequently visited pages, but you can hide these if you'd rather not have everyone seeing some sites you frequent. The new-tab page also lets you reopen closed tabs or your whole last session, or you can star InPrivate browsing from it. Now there's also a "Discover other sites you might like" icon there and link at the bottom which encourages you to use the Suggested sites feature.

Pinned Sites Instead of trumpeting its own branding, IE9 gives the site you're visiting center stage. This is nowhere better demonstrated than in the new pinned-site feature. By simply dragging a webpage's icon down to the Windows 7 taskbar, you create a pinned site. This gives the site equal billing with an application. This is strongly reminiscent of Google's idea of every app as a Web app. With its pinned sites, IE9 goes further than Chrome in this regard. Chrome does have Web applications shortcuts, but they don't get IE9's OS integration. These include Windows 7 jumplists for sites that supply the necessary XML data in their code.

IE9 pinned sites not only get their own taskbar icons, but their favicon is used where a browser logo would normally be, in the upper left corner of the window, and even the back and forward buttons take on the color of the site icon. The logo and colors for IE9 pinned sites are automatically grabbed by the browser for display in the window border. If you navigate to a different domain, the icon remains the same as the original pinned site, which struck me as a bit disorienting. One final difference for pinned sites is that the Home button disappears from their menu bar.

A recent twist on IE9 pinned sited is that you can now add multiple sites to a pinned-site icon. Just open a new tab, right-click on the site icon, and choose "Add as a home page." Though I think that wording could be clarified and the feature made more obvious, the feature offers a convenient way to open a set of frequently visited sites.

Pinned sites are a big ace-in-the-hole for IE9, at least for Windows 7 users, and site owners can promote their sites for pinned treatment and offer buttons on their pages that pin a site automatically. Chrome's application shortcuts do have the advantage of giving the whole window to the site, but Microsoft's giving full app citizenship to sites is commendable.

The One Box Internet Explorer team lead Dean Hachamovitch used to criticize Chrome's use of a combined address and search box, citing privacy concerns, but IE9 now has a single text box for addresses and search, too, called the One Box. Hachamovitch told me that IE9's version adds privacy, by letting you turn on an off the autosuggest feature of your search engine at will. If you still want separate address and search boxes, you can either install a search toolbar or use Opera or Firefox.

The IE9 One Box doesn't offer Chrome's brilliant Instant feature, which loads previously visited sites before you even finish typing their address, but at least it lets you choose among search providers at the bottom of its dropdown suggestions.

One welcome behavior of the One Box is that after you enter a search and get your result page, the box doesn't switch to a URL, but instead your search terms remain there, in case you want to further refine it. And unlike in the IE9 beta, you can now enter searches like "site:site domain" into the One Box to limit results to a specific site.

Michael Muchmore is PC Magazine’s lead analyst for software and Web applications. A native New Yorker, he has at various times headed up PC Magazine’s coverage of Web development, enterprise software, and display technologies. Michael...

Automatic Renewal Program: Your subscription will continue without interruption for as long as you wish, unless
you instruct us otherwise. Your subscription will automatically renew at the end of the term unless you authorize
cancellation. Each year, you'll receive a notice and you authorize that your credit/debit card will be charged the
annual subscription rate(s). You may cancel at any time during your subscription and receive a full refund on all
unsent issues. If your credit/debit card or other billing method can not be charged, we will bill you directly instead. Contact Customer Service